Tech Recruitment – How to Recruit for Non-Tech Roles Within a Hi-Tech Environment

22nd February 2019

Big technology firms from the US setting-up in the UK is nothing new. But as these giants such as Apple, Google and Salesforce start to mature as organisations, it seems that the type of employees that they are looking for are moving away from the hands-on tech side to business support roles such as account and operations management, project management and marketing.

For internal recruiters within these firms, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to finding the right people to fill these roles. When support teams are hired in other more established sectors, it can be fairly straightforward to find someone that has similar experience. But when your company has created a tool or a platform that is unique, how do you find the people with the right skills to the table and succeed in the role?

Mind the (Language) Gap

One of the biggest challenges faced when recruiting into technology companies, especially within roles that span operational and customer facing such as account management, is finding someone that can understand and communicate the value of the technology to a wider audience. In essence, you will be looking for a translator that can stand between technology teams and non-technology personnel and be able to use the right skills and abilities to successfully communicate between the two.

The key to this is in finding people with the right transferable skills and core ability to meet the requirements within your job role. Is the priority client communication? Then prioritise this and include product training at the heart of your onboarding process. Does an operations management role involve a level of wider business communication? Then finding someone that has prior experience as a tech project lead that can clearly communicate effectively with development teams and make this information clear at board level is going to be a prime asset.

Transferable Skills

Finding people that might be from different industries but may have skills that can be carried across is also a good way to approach hiring your support teams. If you’re looking for superstar marketers, those within agencies may have hands-on experience of working with numerous technology companies around the world, and with agencies not being the best paid places to work for junior to mid weight roles, many could be enticed to make the move in-house with the generally higher salaries paid by tech companies.

Ultimately, hiring within a technology company is much like recruiting within any sector. There will always be a learning curve and by creating a job specification that specifically lays out the demands, duties and deliverables of the candidate, you should manage to find people with the right core competencies to bring to the table. If they have a proven ability to deliver in other similar roles, ensure your internal training procedures are stringent and you’ll find that you can promote your role to a much wider audience than you expected.

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